This App Makes People Look Gorgeous In Photos

Aviv Gadot, cofounder and CEO of Israeli startup Pixtr, is a good-looking man with a beautiful wife. He loves taking photos of her with his iPhone and posting them to Facebook, but she was never happy about it.

"My wife was always grabbing my phone and deleting most of my pictures. She's beautiful and she feels bad about how she looks in photos. That's wrong. I wanted her to feel good about herself," he said.

So, he used his engineering skills to build an app that would automatically airbrush each photo to counteract his less-than-perfect photography skills.

It turns out, lots of people are terrible photographers who take ugly pictures of their loved ones. So with two of his college buddies, he turned the app into a company, Pixtr.

Here's how the app works: Open the picture on your iPhone and open the app. It uses face recognition software to scan the photo and make minor adjustments like slimming a nose or a jawline, trimming eyebrows, correcting camera distortion. It takes into account things like sex, hair color, age.

In a few seconds the photo is "fixed." Notice the eyes, nose, lips, all done instantly and automatically.

It doesn't do anything big, like Photoshop 20 pounds off your tummy or let you swap in a body builder's biceps.

The app is free. Pixtr charges $1 to edit a batch of photos, like all the pics from your vacation. That's $1 per batch, not per photo, too.

Pixtr is one of 13 cloud computing companies that just graduated from Microsoft second Azure accelerator program in Israel. Gadot is in the process of lining up investors and has already signed one big angel: Uri Levine, co-founder of the navigation app, Waze. (Waze is like the Facebook of Israel, today's hottest homegrown startup).

The app launched two weeks ago but the company just came out of stealth this week. With no marketing, it already has 1,500 downloads mostly from Denmark, Italy and in Los Angeles.

(Disclosure: Microsoft paid some of the travel expenses for Business Insider to attend the cloud computing event in Tel Aviv on Tuesday where we met Pixtr.)